Modern Prose Fiction II: Pathways Through Fiction

How do you get from Point “A” to Point “B”? Do you take the most direct pathway, to save time and energy? Or do you take a more circuitous pathway, to see the sights and take your chances? When literary critics read works of fiction, they too take pathways, sometimes known as critical approaches. Depending on the critical approach they use—or the pathway they follow—the same literary work can take on a variety of new and unexpected meanings. In ENGL 162/3.0, we will study some of the most influential pathways through fiction, such as formalist criticism, reader-response criticism, gender criticism, sociological criticism, ecological criticism, postmodernist criticism, and more. We will study a diverse range of short-fiction authors, including Thomas King, Octavia Butler, Rohinton Mistry, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sherman Alexie, Madeleine Thien, and others.